


Love is the Value of Life

by Jawanaka



Category: Cyberpunk 2077 (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Corpo V (Cyberpunk 2077), F/F, Gen, Introspection, Romance, neo-noir ish, what do you have left when you've lost everything
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-29
Updated: 2020-12-29
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:35:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,264
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28414740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jawanaka/pseuds/Jawanaka
Summary: At Arasaka Counter-intell they teach you that every life has value, and that that value can be as meticulously calculated as the roll-out of a new phone model. But even if you have lost value to the corp and to yourself, someone may find a value in you.
Relationships: Judy Alvarez/Female V, Judy Alvarez/V
Comments: 2
Kudos: 85





	Love is the Value of Life

At Arasaka Counter-intell they teach you that every life has value, and that that value can be as meticulously calculated as the roll-out of a new phone model. Every operation a cost-benefit analysis, every field agent an investment with limited shelf-life, every warranty wont as soon as inconvenient to the corp. A infiltrator into Biotechnica’s development department is a risk counterbalanced against gain, the agent to be pulled at the exact time as the graph reaches it’s zenith, like a stockbrokers AI predicting which way the curve will go.

A dog’s life is that of a Corpo-rat. In the edge of her eye V can see Johnny scoff at the mixed metaphors. No fucking sense of poetry in the young today says the old-timer who technically both is-and-isn’t an old-timer.

Much like V both is and isn’t alive.

See on the one hand she died, clinically. On the other she’s very much alive, thank you very much bartender and hit me up with another, save for the malfunctioning chip in her skull. Which on the third hand leads to the point that she is living of borrowed time, a meticulously manufactured Saka atomic clock ticking down to her oblivion, her erasure, her replacement with a long-dead rocker wannabe terrorist complete (which would only be the third weirdest thing to happen in the Night city that week).

Everyone in this city says they’re living on borrowed time, preferably while dramatically swigging tequila and sucking on neo-tobacco cigarettes in neon-lighted bars. V is one of the few who actually mean it.

V is undead. Not a ghost mind you, silently haunting the back-alleys and underground markets of the city, like the skezzers living underneath highways or the conked out cyberpsychos who haunt the town waiting for ganger, max-tac or merc to take them down.

V is a vampire, leaching the city for blood in the vain hope of prolonging her own life, leaving a trail of death and shattered bodies in her wake.

Did those lives have value? In her mind they barely have an identity anymore, 6th street and Tyger Claws and Maelstrom floating together in a miasma of blood and broken cyberparts. Their business is to be in her way and her business is to dispose of them. V no longer concerns herself with values. No memo’s left to file, no Jenkins to appease, the daily grind of meeting out meticulously organized violence, espionage and theft with all the passion of a plumber with bureaucracy attached. Her own life has a definite down-market value the closer she comes to her expiration date. And also, bartender, that was not what I wanted to discuss. Left the corpo-life behind, or more accurately it left her and filed a restraining order too, hahaha.

V is a shark, she either moves forward or dies. And somehow, despite it all, she’s not ready to die just yet.

Life still finds a way to have value. Maybe it is seeing the sun setting over the badlands, sitting with her back against the dirt-bike she used for expeditions outside the city. Maybe it’s noodles from the foodstalls at entrance of her mega-building, stir-fried in soy with vegetables and shrimp (real shrimp too and she has no idea how they do it).

Maybe it is the dark eyes of a BD technician with a heart of gold and rose tattoos on places secret and not so secret.

It is an exquisite betrayal Johnny says (not that he has any room to criticize mind you). Promising a future when you know very well that you have nothing to offer. Nothing to give but blood and betrayal and heartache and an expanding collection of weaponry and vehicles and the occasional well-placed punch in the face of someone who deserves it. 

V is a con-woman and love is such a great con that she even manages trick herself.

It is scary and inconvenient and fucking beautiful. 

As a corpo-rat, love was frowned upon and usually the reason for a sit-down with HR. Sex was just another way to blow of steam, captured in the nooks and crannies of Arisaka tower, in the doublebeds of up-scale hotels and dollhouses and on the flight-couches of aerodynes. You retreated back into your own shell afterwards, making sure to never let your guard down. 

But V has nothing left to guard, especially with the fairly loathsome visage of an aged lecherous rocker-boy living rent-free in her head, so she lets Judy in. She’s hasn’t woken up in the arms of anyone she wasn’t paying by the hour since highschool yet it only takes her looming and imminent death to do it. A false promise that one day they could wake up, there would be no parasite in her head, no more people needing killing, no more corps and gangs, just soft skin and warm smiles. But when she untangles herself from her lover the world comes back in full neon-kitsch technicolor and her world once again becomes the ticking clock to oblivion.

Its a sweet, sweet tragedy in the making, soft and cool as the California rains. And V’s heart is warm with love while her gut is acid with lies and her brain filled with doubt.

When her life was just her own she could calculate it’s value to herself, her associates and the corp in minute detail. Now though she has lost some central part of the calculus, numbers obscured behind some code she cannot crack.

Some part of her (Johnny? Its probably Johnny) says that this is just her deluding herself, trying to find some hidden meaning to what is transparently an attempt to find solace and forgetting her impending doom in the arms of a compassionate-to-a-fault techie with a penchant for broken things. Not like V has any value as anything beyond that (this is probably her corpo-brain speaking).

Yet, Judy doesn’t calculate value in the same way she does. The girl may be out there trying to save every broken dolls and discarded joytoys in the city but she doesn’t treat V like another addition to her broken toy collection. She treats her like, well, her. The problem is of course that V doesn’t really know how to be anyone that isn’t yet another weapon in the Saka arsenal, or the merc who is the terror of the city’s underbelly (and Night city is pretty much all underbelly) and the delight of the fixers. Her value is defined by her ability to deal death to those that oppose, well, not her technically but whoever was ponying up the eddies.

But that is not the person she sees reflected in Judy’s eyes when she wakes in the morning. For the first time someone is valuating V on some scale unknown or unfathomable to her. And while that honestly scares the shit out of her, it isn’t like she has anything left to lose.

Well she got Judy. But maybe, just maybe, that’s enough to give her something to fight for, to be actually more than what she was.

It’s a vain fucking hope, she knows, especially in this town. But for the first time in a long while her life has another possible trajectory then ‘up’, ‘forward’ or ‘away’.

Bean-counters at Arisaka would never have considered it or included it in their calculations. And yeah, maybe it’s cheesy and maybe I had enough but that’s the thing about love isn’t it.

It adds value to life.

And for the first time in a long while V doesn’t just want to survive.

She wants to live.

**Author's Note:**

> Still haven't finished the game but this plotbunny ambushed me in the middle of the day and I had to put it down on paper.


End file.
